Tumblr’s Inflection Point Came When Curators Joined Creators

Tumblr was an accidental social network, said founder and CEO David Karp, speaking at the DLD conference in Munich today.

In its early days, the service didn’t have the “steep social network growth” you might expect, because it was about a core community of creators, Karp said. The company originally set out to build novel tools that offered an escape from the restrictive templates of Facebook and Twitter.

When the site really took off was when the curators — people who primarily respond to other Tumblr users’ content by “reblogging” it on their own pages — came on board.

At 15 billion page views per month across more than 41 million blogs, “with that many page views we could throw AdSense up there tomorrow and be profitable,” Karp said. But that’s not what he wants to do.

Karp said Tumblr is also working to “try and filter our network in ways that are more appealing to a global market.”

He added that Tumblr takes pride in being a New York-based company, and in hiring people with experience building things on the Web, rather than degrees from schools like Stanford. Half of Tumblr’s recent hires have relocated to New York to work for the company, most of them from the West Coast, Karp said.

Just as the atom bomb was the weapon that was supposed to render war obsolete, the Internet seems like capitalism’s ultimate feat of self-destructive genius, an economic doomsday device rendering it impossible for anyone to ever make a profit off anything again. It’s especially hopeless for those whose work is easily digitized and accessed free of charge.

— Author Tim Kreider on not getting paid for one’s work

AllThingsD by Writer

AllThingsD.com is a Web site devoted to news, analysis and opinion on technology, the Internet and media. But it is different from other sites in this space. It is a fusion of different media styles, different topics, different formats and different sources. Read more »